The Chocolate Message
Chocolate. We have to make New Orleans Chocolate again! The mayor of New Orleans said so!
To be honest, I can’t figure out what people are so upset over. So the Mayor liked having a large black population and wants it back. That’s not racist. Hell, that’s the same policy Israel operates under, only without the use of military force and international immigration. I like black people, too, Mayor!
I was never that big a fan of the newspaper cartoon The Boondocks. It always struck me as topical in all the wrong ways, hung up on cliché and popular culture in ways that I didn’t have much use for, and I rarely found it that funny. In contrast, it translates into a half hour long adult swim cartoon with grace and flourish.
To be frank, it may be my favorite show on television right now, funny as hell but moreso because it may be the only relevant social commentary the idiot box has to offer outside of the Daily Show, anymore. To the naked and unwary eye, The Boondocks may seem like some kind of post-modern response to ‘black culture’, but I think that’s just the façade. It does expose the fact that much of Black Culture has simply become a shade of consumer culture, true, and it does it well, and humorously (though it’s a black humor,) but the underlying message is one not too far removed from more extreme voices such as the Discordian Society, Church of the Subgenius or even the more wide awake branches of the Green party: that racism, really bigotry in all forms, is simply one of the many terrible symptoms of a human culture crafted upon a foundation of ignorance and fear for over a thousand generations.
The Boondocks uses what might be aptly termed by even the squarest of squares the ‘sell out’ of much of the black movement to illustrate the underlying failure of modern progress in any form. Through our characters, we see in rapid succession, the failure of the goodhearted but weak willed citizen(Granpa,) the success of the amoral and greedy who prey upon the former (Riley,) and foremost the failure of the wise, whose ability to see their world with perfect clarity without being able to influence, or even communicate, with it increasingly isolates them from their fellows, (Chomsk… I mea, Huey.)
The Boondocks MLK day special, a 'what if Martin Luther King were to come back today' notion, painted a fictional scenario which reflected the potential reality with an aptitude I thought only Tarantino capable of. A scene showing King in an Apple computer store, staring up at a large artistic advertisement of himself, Einstein and some other famous historic figure all wearing Ipod headsets alone cemented the message clearly. It has caused me to ponder furiously about the nature and method of the Fun Party, which in the end has mostly been devoted to ‘the pitch’ in order to move its message.
Is there another approach, a way to return, in some manner to the days of honest peaceful revolution, or do all revolutions ultimately result in the faces of their fallen warriors being sold on t-shirts for twenty dollars a pop to idiots? Is there really anyone in the US anymore that’s interested in a complex message of change, or are they mostly interested in a good laugh and a little righteous indignation. If we even had a solution, would attempting to find a real vehicle by which to convey it serve any purpose besides to begin the process of isolating us from others, until we become hermits, old men sitting on top of desolate mountains waiting desperately for someone who wants to learn the truth hard enough to seek us out?
Reports indicate that the CIA recently bombed a village of civilians in Pakisatan. Their supposed target, another member of Al-Queda, probably got away. Many civilians were needlessly killed. The attack took place without the permission of Pakistan, who is protesting and condemning the incident. Pakistan, by the way, has developed nuclear weapons. The people of the United States were outraged at the racist comments of the Mayor of New Orleans.
At the Golden Globe awards Chris Rock was quoted as saying, towards the end of MLK day, “don't worry, you only need to be nice to black people for two more hours.”
